One of the attractions of travel is experiencing how people live in other places. A place's unique sights and sounds give us pause and take us out of the little boxes in which we live from day to day. We all need to be shaken loose from our own little worlds. To see things through other peoples' eyes. Perhaps breaking down some of the we-they barriers between us.
When we were tent-camping, we used to go to grocery stores whenever we emerged from wilderness places and needed to restock our traveling pantry. Grocery stores also were great places to see what the "locals" ate and how they constructed their little boxes in ways that differed from ours.
Or we ate in small cafes and listened to the chatter of people talking about things that make up their lives. Nothing like being in a cafe where ranchers all wore baseball hats advertising products needed to make their ranches work. Now it is Mac and Don's, Subway, Perkins et al.
Local newspapers were a good source of the fabric of how lives were woven together. Even when I couldn't read the language, the photos told me a lot about how life happened in a particular place.
Not anymore. It is as if all the places I travel (and beyond) have been dumped into a huge blender to homogenize life everywhere. Folks eat the same things I can buy in my local supermarket chain - maybe a little more spicy or less spicy, but generally the same food products produced by just a few mega-corporations.
Turn on the TV in a motel or hotel room. Thanks to the "miracle of cable," we all watch the same stuff and hear the same homogenized versions of political issues. Whether it is war in Gaza, Putin's latest audacities, or Washington's paralysis. Doesn't matter whether I am in New Mexico, Maine, or Oregon. Same old, same old news. Local papers are hard to come by - replaced by USA Today. And universal evening programs are even at the same time as they are at home. PBS, the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic anyone?
Walk down the street. People wear the same things they do at home, with only small regional differences. Even when I travel to countries beyond the one in which I live. Thanks to Target, Walmart, or other chains. Do you realize when you buy an article of clothing that you think is unique for you, these chains are dictating how you look - just like all the other folks in the country?
Only languages differ - and with the universality of English, only local accents tell me (sometimes) I am from somewhere else. Even if I watch BBC, where Brits still sound like Brits, the accents that once told me what part of England they might be from are disappearing as folks speak "perfect unaccented English."A treasured memory was when we walked into a restaurant in Germany and were handed a menu in German. Only when I asked the meaning of a word on the menu did the wait-person exclaim Oh, I thought you were German! and rush off for the English version.
No longer do I need to travel away from home to enlarge my worldview - because your town is just like my town. What a loss for us all!
At least the mountains and the seas retain their distinctive characteristics. The horror of the thought of dumping the Rocky Mountains into the blender with the Smokies. Or the Mediterranean with the North Pacific! Wild places still manage to push back against all this cultural assimilation and sameness!
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